Wednesday, 29 May
It is so sunny and warm that Polly and I started to unpack our summer clothes. They aren’t up to much. We’ve both grown so that our cotton frocks look silly and
there’s nothing left to let down because Ellen let them down last year. Also they don’t fit us in other places that I won’t mention here – I’ve never liked the
idea of bulging anywhere, although Poll seemed quite calm about it. ‘It’s a step on the way,’ she said, ‘it happens to everybody.’ I’ve never seen the point
of that: why, if it was the end of the world, would you feel better because it was the end for everyone else too? I do wish that Dad would write. It’s well over two weeks since even
Zoë had a letter. She doesn’t seem to mind about that so much; she likes him to ring up – I do, too, but when he does of course Zoë gets the lion’s share.
Aeroplanes go over such a lot now that we hardly notice them. Aunt Syb and Zoë said they’d make us two new frocks each if Aunt Villy would get the material and she took us to
Hastings in the car – what a treat! – and when we got out on the front to see the sea, we could hear a distant thundery rumbling and Aunt Villy said it was guns. There were quite a
lot of people on the front, just leaning on railings and staring out. Of course you can’t see France from there, and that made the guns feel worse. The sea was oily calm but we
couldn’t see any ships. Then Aunt Villy said, ‘Well! It will all be the same a hundred years hence,’ which was the only annoying thing she said that day, and we walked to the
shop to get material. Aunt Villy said we could choose within reason, which meant, I suppose, that if we chose something she didn’t approve of we wouldn’t be allowed to have it.
Polly said she wanted pink, because Aunt Syb always dressed her in blues and greens because of her hair. ‘But I think pinks and reds are lovely together,’ she said. She chose a
piqué the colour of strawberry ice and a lilac-coloured Tootal cotton with tiny little flowers all over it, but I couldn’t think what to choose because actually I don’t care
very much about clothes except I hate them to be at all frilly and girly-wirly. I asked Poll to choose for me because she really enjoys that sort of thing. She chose something called gingham
– a sort of greeny-grey or greyish-green checked in thin white squares and a white and yellow striped stuff. Aunt Villy said they were good choices, and she got four yards of each.
‘They may have to last you a long time,’ she said. Then we went to a chemist and Aunt Villy bought charcoal biscuits for Aunt Syb and a very nice torch for Miss Milliment to help
her see her way back to the cottage because she slipped and fell last week and the blood all stuck to her stocking but she hadn’t noticed. Poll and I think this means she doesn’t
take her stockings off
at night
, which is unusual.
Then
we went to a bookshop and kind Aunt Villy said one book each up to two bob and I got ghost stories by M. R. James and
Polly got—
Dad rang up! He spoke to me for a whole six minutes! He said never mind if the pips go, I really want to talk to you. He said he has almost stopped feeling seasick, but that might be because
he has been at sea for quite a long time so he’d had a chance to get used to it. He said there had been a whole bundle of letters when he got in this time – even one from Neville. I
said it was difficult to write interesting letters from a place where nothing happened, but he said I wrote extremely good letters that interested
him
, just keep doing it. He said
quite all right about more pocket money – tell Aunt Rach. I asked him when he would get leave and he didn’t know. He was off again quite soon, but he’d ring up when he got
back. I asked him whether he knew if being bored helped people to go mad and he didn’t know and asked me why I asked him, and I told him about Aunt Villy’s mother, and he said, oh,
well, I might be right. Then he made the noise that destroyers make when they’re pleased about something – a kind of honking whoop which was very funny. I don’t know what they
make it with. Me, of course, he said, and we both laughed all through the pips. Then he asked me to look after Zoë, as usual, and I said I was doing my best but he didn’t seem to
hear because he went on about her having the baby when he wasn’t there and that was hard on her. I said she seemed placid and quite resigned to her fate which he seemed to find
reassuring. I asked him how he thought the war was going, and he said he supposed not awfully well at the moment, but he was sure the tide would turn. It is quite frightening to think of the
Germans as a tide, and I shan’t tell Polly that. Then he said he thought he should speak to the Duchy, and I asked Polly to get her, and while she was doing that, he said, ‘Remember
I love you enormously,’ and I said I did too. And then the Duchy came and he said, ‘Sleep tight,’ which was idiotic of him as it was only half past six. It’s funny.
I’ve wanted him to ring up or write for so long and now he has and it just makes me feel awfully sad – a bit frightened as well. I thought of a whole lot of things I hadn’t
told him and each of them seemed trivial considered separately, but I still wanted to have told him
all
of them, because as the weeks go by there are more and more things and in about
a year he might hardly know me at all. It’s different for him, because on the whole it seems to me that grown-ups don’t change. If that is true, I wonder
when
people get
sort of finished and stay like whatever they have become. And whether they can
choose
when it is.
I cried about Dad after he rang. I wasn’t going to put that in, but I did, so I have. I just do miss him so much and hearing his voice, and then
not
hearing his voice is well
nigh unbearable. I think probably that sex makes love less of a
strain
. So when it’s a case of love, and sex is out of the question – not that I in the least want to
sleep
with Dad, but I can see that there might be something very tranquil about it if I did.
Here the thought that there must be more to sleeping with a person than
sleeping
with them recurred as it often had, but try as she might she could not think exactly
what
. And
who the hell could she ask? Miss Milliment did not seem very interested in sex on the only occasions when she had tried some gentle pumping of her on the subject. She had tended to say rather vague
things like it was only an aspect and one which, except from a biological point of view – and she did not teach biology – was better left to experience at the proper time than to
discussion, which, she felt, would serve no useful purpose. Clary was back to having to find someone to fall in love
with
in order to find out about it. This made her stop wanting to write
her journal properly for several days.
Friday, 31 May
The aunts have gone to Tunbridge Wells. Aunt Syb is to have her barium meal which apparently is thick chalky stuff that you have to drink down in one go and then they X-ray
your stomach and can see if you have an ulcer. Also poor Aunt Villy is going to see her mother again. They have taken Miss Milliment as her eyes are needing better spectacles. Zoë has made
me the yellow striped dress: I quite like it although I look a bit silly. Zoë said I should have white sandals, but I’m perfectly happy with sandshoes. It is quite hot and aeroplanes
seem to go over all the time. I know this is an extraordinary week, but I can’t think of anything to say about it. We go on having breakfast, lunch and supper and doing lessons and having
free time (ha, ha) in the afternoons. They always think of something boring for us to do. Today it was carting logs that Tonbridge and McAlpine have sawed to be stacked in the garage. The logs
have poor beetles and woodlice in them, and Polly wastes an awful lot of time getting them off and putting them somewhere else although they might easily die a natural death before the logs get
used. They are getting people back from France now, but there are thousands to collect and quite a lot of them are wounded, which must make it terribly difficult. They are clearing out the
people who are convalescent from Mill Farm in case the beds are wanted for soldiers. M. R. James is rather good: he writes as though he always wears a dark suit. One cannot imagine him in
shirtsleeves. The stories frighten me just the right amount. Goodness, I hate knitting! Poll likes it which, of course, makes her much better at it than I am.
The trouble about a journal is the feeling that you have to keep on keeping it. Polly has completely given up hers; on the other hand, she’s the one who reads bits of
The
Times
every day – in a way, if she
was
writing her journal, she’d probably give a far better account of what is going on – only about seventy miles away she says
– than I seem to do. She says she can hear the guns sometimes, but she
listens
for them, and it may be simply her imagination.
Here she stopped again, defeated. It was all very well to say that we were living through history, a remark she had overheard Tonbridge making to Mrs Cripps when she went to fetch Miss
Milliment’s mid-morning glass of hot water, but what, actually, was happening? And what was it all
for
? If one didn’t know these things, it was clearly impossible to have
feelings about them interesting enough to put into a journal. The only feeling she knew was missing Dad and worrying about him getting torpedoed or shot or something. Perhaps everybody felt like
that? Worried about the one thing they knew about and left the rest as a nasty mystery. She decided to do some investigating. She started with the servants because at least they stopped what they
were doing and answered you. Dottie was turning down the beds and she only said that Mrs Cripps said that Hitler didn’t know where to stop. When asked what she felt about it, she looked
confounded: in fact, nobody had ever asked her in her life what she felt about anything. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ she said twitching off the counterpane, as Eileen had
taught her to do, and catching the corners neatly together. Ellen, who was bathing Wills, said she was sure that all the soldiers would come back and that it was best to look on the bright side of
things. Eileen said we had to remember that we had a navy and people like Hitler always went too far. It was better to be safe than sorry. Mrs Cripps said that Hitler didn’t know where to
stop and look at our air force – adding rather mysteriously that what went up must come down. The Brig told her not to worry her pretty little head about any of it. He was having his hair cut
by Aunt Villy, jolly difficult as there wasn’t a lot of it. Aunt Villy said that we must put our faith in Mr Churchill. Aunt Rach said it was all pretty awful, but don’t you worry too
much about your dad, my duck – and so it went on. It seemed as though none of them knew anything much, or were able or willing to tell her if they did. She gave up, having resolved to leave
Polly out of it in case of distressing her, but that evening when they were very slowly setting about going to bed, Polly suddenly said: ‘What do you think it would actually be like if the
Germans do invade us?’
As a matter of fact she had several times tried to imagine what it would be like and got . . . not nowhere – but rather, to a whole lot of different places that did not fit with each
other. People being burned at the stake, little boys being sent up chimneys, like they were in Victorian times, Trafalgar Square being absolutely crammed with Germans in their tureen-shaped
helmets, being a slave, sent to prison, Hitler living at Home Place with all of them washing his shirts and cooking and doing his housework, being spat at and made to learn German, living on black
bread and water – these and many other random notions crammed her mind, sounding ghastly, of course, but sounding silly and pointless as well . . .
‘What do you think?’ she said.
‘I find it so difficult to think about it at all. I suppose they could murder us all, and then send a lot of Germans to live here, and if they didn’t actually kill us, I expect they
would be very horrible to us, but it doesn’t seem at all
real
to me. I mean, I can’t see what
they
would get out of it.’
‘Well, England and all the things in it – some of them pretty costly, like pictures in the National Gallery and the Crown jewels, and thousands of houses to live in. Oh, yes, and
lots of beaches – they’re pretty short of seaside resorts.’
‘Not now they’ve got Holland and France and Norway and Belgium.’
‘Well, I suppose, ruling the world. They’d get the whole Empire as well – it wouldn’t just be England. I mean, that’s what dictators want, isn’t it? Napoleon
and all that.’
Polly sighed. ‘I must say, I begin to see the point of being a conscientious objector, like Christopher was last year.’
‘
I
don’t. There’s no point in that unless everybody was one, and it’s obvious that that will never happen.’
‘You know perfectly well that that is a stupid argument. All reforms are made by a few people who everybody laughs at, or martyrs.’
‘Anyway,’ Clary was stung by being called stupid, ‘we have right on our side. Mr Churchill said that Hitler and all he stood for was evil.’
‘Yes, but that’s one of the things about good leaders: they always manage to make their side feel they’re right. Hitler does that, you bet. And considering that nobody seems to
know what’s going on, let alone
why
, that’s essential.’
Clary couldn’t argue with that; it was what she had been discovering all day. Unless— ‘You don’t think that the uncles and so on
do
know, but they don’t
think they ought to tell us?’
‘I asked Dad that last weekend. He said, “Polly, if I knew anything for certain, I’d tell you. You have as much right to know as anyone else.”’
‘But what does he
think
?’
Polly shrugged, but she looked uneasy. ‘He just wouldn’t say.’
They looked at each other; Clary had got into her nightdress – Polly was naked, and hunting for hers under her pillow. When she had found it and pulled it over her head, she said,
‘Well, whatever happens, let’s you and me stay together. You’re my best friend, Clary,
anything
would be better with you. And anything would be worse without
you.’